Trello scrum board labels

Trello Scrum Labels

When you’re in charge of a team board, you usually get a chance to set the rules for your domain. I’ve struggled a bit with labels, since there’s a tendency to make them very specific. This is counter-productive because it becomes more difficult in active boards to group tasks via filters.

After a few projects, I’ve narrowed down my list of default labels to:

Feature

Urgent

Bug

Blocker

Improvement

FrontEnd

BackEnd

Although Trello sorts them by color, they are somewhat related to each other:

Type of Task: Feature / Bug / Improvement. Shouldn’t be more than one. Labelling tasks correctly will help in sprint planning if you want to balance a release among the three kind of tasks, or if you want to focus in a specific one.

Level of importance: Urgent / Blocker. Most tasks should have neither. Urgent is top-down red flag. Blocker is typically a bottom-up signal. Both of them at the same time… it’s a fire.

Layer: FrontEnd / BackEnd. The separation is a bit arbitrary and it’s mostly to have an idea which team the task involves. It’s possible to also involve both, but shouldn’t be that common.

Remember: A task/card should not have more than three labels. If that’s the case you actually have more than 1 tasks, and should split them up for clarity.